Wartime heroines forgotten in peace

Newly released documents lift the lid on the achievements of Britain’s female
spies

Whether over Instagram, Facebook or in real life, women are always spying

By Clare Mulley

7:00AM BST 18 Sep 2014

In November 1944, an attractive 24-year-old blonde in an elegant dress walked over and introduced herself to a young man at a hotel bar in Chester. They got on rather well. He was very much “an American boy type”, she later reported to her handlers, and his reaction to her advances “suggested rather a kind of eager friendliness, than surprise or suspicion”.

The woman’s name was Marie Christine Chilver, alias Christine Collard, yesterday revealed as “Fifi”. She was a highly trained member of the security section of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) – the organisation set up in 1940 to operate behind enemy lines during the Second World War.

The man was Jack Berry, a potential special agent, who had all but completed his training in survival skills, sabotage, guns, explosives and communications. Berry did not know that he now faced one final test; an interview with this attractive “French journalist” whose real job it was to use her charm, guile and ingenuity to discover whether he would be a liability in the field.

Though her story is fascinating, Fifi was just one of several women employed in such a role – and the unravelling of their secretive careers, wrought with danger and intrigue, has been a long time coming.

Noreen Riols, one of the last surviving members of SOE’s French Section, now aged 88 and living in France, undertook the same task in Bournemouth and Southampton.

“It was standard practice,” she explains, “happening all the time.” Riols liked to meet her targets at the Royal Bath hotel, because “adjoining the dining room was a large terrace overlooking the sea which, on a warm, moonlit evening, lent itself to a very romantic scenario, making the task much easier”.

She found that, while most of the British officers didn’t talk, some – especially the young ones – did. “They were lonely,” she remembers, but if their loneliness could be exploited while an agent were still on Allied turf, how much more vulnerable would they be behind enemy lines?

The female “honey trap” is often parodied, with the beautiful women who set out to entrap quickly finding themselves seduced in Bond films. But women like Chilver and Riols were made of sterner stuff.

Despite music and moonlit bays, there was little glamour or sentiment when the women filed their reports or had to confront the agents, many of whom were not happy at having been deceived.

Chilver, like Riols, had no qualms about her role. “Compared to what is most likely to happen in the field, it is very mild and innocent. It would be a pity to have to give up this method, because it does give the students a chance of using their brains [or just their low cunning],” she wrote.

These were women employed as much for their language skills and judgment as for their charm and good looks. The prospective agents they questioned included British, French and Norwegian recruits, and ultimately it was the women’s assessment that determined whether these men would serve in the field.

Marie Chilver’s personal file is one of thousands of documents made available online by the National Archives, and which help to reveal the roles women played in the SOE.

Of course, many were office staff, but even these were not all secretaries. The formidable Vera Atkins was number two to Maurice Buckmaster, the Head of SOE’s F (French) section, and, many believe, was the brains in the department. After the war, Atkins fought to create a role to trace what happened to all the special agents who did not return from active duty; an appalling job she completed with grim determination. And then there were the female agents themselves.

From 1941, SOE went out of its way to recruit, train and deploy women. The French section alone sent 39 into the field, mainly to work as couriers. Thirteen would not return.

The most famous of these women, London shop girl Violette Szabo and French-born Odette Hallowes, whose lives were celebrated in films in the Fifties, are rightly honoured for their courage and sacrifice. However, female special agents as a whole still seem to be remembered more as tragically romantic figures, rather than for their achievements.

There is also a myth that they were all beautiful. Atkins herself once claimed that “they were all attractive women. It gave them self-confidence.” Many were. Violette Szabo, the Indian Muslim Princess Noor Inayat Khan and, of course, the notorious German spy Mata Hari during the First World War, were all remarkably beautiful, while the Polish-born Krystyna Skarbek, alias Christine Granville, had been a beauty queen before the war. All knew how to use their looks as one more weapon in their armoury.

However, many did not have looks to fall back on, and indeed any distinguishing features – such as striking beauty – could be seen as a disadvantage in the field where it paid to blend in. In fact, F section recruited women of all classes, nationalities, faiths and appearances, and even one, Virginia Hall, who had only one leg.

As Germany sent more men to the front, they began to rely on forced factory labour. Hundreds and thousands of French workers were deported to work in Germany under the Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO. Soon any able-bodied Frenchman travelling around the country was cause for suspicion.

SOE sent special agents into France to help arm, train and support the Resistance. Resistance circuits were organised in cells based on the IRA model. The problem was how to keep them in touch.

This is where women first came in. Travelling by train or bike, they were less likely to be stopped and made perfect couriers. It was their anonymity that made them effective.

Soon, women were recruited for other roles, too. Khan was the first woman sent into France as a wireless operator, not only moving her heavy wireless between safe houses, but also coding and transmitting the messages. She was eventually caught, refused to talk under interrogation, and was executed at Dachau.

Other female agents found they were required for greater roles. The French-born British national Pearl Witherington was parachuted into France to serve as a courier in 1943. After the arrest of her circuit leader, she became chief, and led more than 1,500 French members of the Maquis, who fought the German Army during the D-Day landings.

None of this prevented casual sexism from assuming she played a rather different role. When, sleeping in a dripping tent surrounded by soldiers, she requested pyjamas, she received a parcel containing “several silk negligées and nightdresses in pink and peach satin”.

At the end of the war, Witherington, like her fellow female agents, discovered that, as a woman, she did not qualify for military honours. When awarded the MBE (Civil) instead, she retorted that “there was nothing civil about what I did”.

Fifi was among the SOE women discarded after the war. In April 1945, she received weapons training, and courses in the wireless, Morse and coding – “punching a key is, perhaps, not an occupation designed to sharpen one’s mental faculties,” she complained. She, like so many of the SOE women, eventually returned to civilian life without recognition.

Let us hope that the digitisation of the National Archive files helps to illuminate more of the stories of these remarkable women – Fifi, Riols and their colleagues – who served alongside their male counterparts, but were rather less well remembered in the peace.

Clare Mulley is the author of 'The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville’ (2013). www.claremulley.com